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The Internet

Tracking The Status Of Popular Websites? 104

Posted by Cliff from the is-it-up-or-down dept.
An Unnamed Correspondent asks: "I am one of those that decided, a long time ago, to use a @yahoo.com free mail account as a permanent address, since I move from one ISP to another all the time. Last week, I was having huge problems with my free account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down. I didn't know if this was a problem local to me or if it was Yahoo!'s fault. I sent them an e-mail asking about this, but I received no reply. I have been browsing all of Yahoo! to see if they have some kind of net status, to no avail. The other day CNN.com was not working for me. Maybe it was overloaded because of the elections, but I didn't know, and I couldn't find out. Is there some kind of Web page giving news about the status of the more popular Web services?" An interesting idea ... would something like this be possible to pull off in an effective way (and what would one do if the monitoring service itself is unavailable?)
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Tracking Network Status of Popular Websites? More

Tracking Network Status of Popular Websites?

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  • Their MX hosts are acting weird (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know if they put some new load balancing into place or what but the company I work for recently changed its privacy policy and we were advised to notify all of our users. This resulted in having to send enail to the approx 2 million users that gave us their email address so we could notify them of things like this and quite a few have Yahoo.com addresses.

    We are having a devil of a time getting that mail through to the Yahoo users. The preferential MX seems to change with each lookup. If you try to connect to less preferential MX host (higher number) it will either refuse the connection, time out, or drop the connection at the envelope sender.

    This plays HELL with mailers that keep delivery hints like Exim. I think their system relies on a fresh DNS lookup for each delivery. It is as if they are using an F5 3DNS for load balancing or something. If you connect to the wrong host, your email does not get through.

    Also, each host seems to have a gazillion IP addresses associated with it. Some of them respond, some dont.

    Log entries like this are common:

    2000-11-25 14:12:49 13zcjX-0000y9-04 Remote host mx2.mail.yahoo.com [128.11.68.59] closed connection after initial connection

    2000-11-25 14:12:49 13zcjX-0000y9-04 Remote host mx2.mail.yahoo.com [128.11.69.55] closed connection after MAIL FROM: SIZE=5114

    2000-11-25 14:19:07 13zYFa-0006gy-04 SMTP timeout while connected to mx1.mail.yahoo.com [216.115.107.17] after end of data (4068 bytes written): Connection timed out

    I have no idea what the heck is going on over there but it is taking forever to get this mail into Yahoo. I wish they would fix it. I have had to build a separate machine just to handle the yahoo.com mail.
  • Perhaps something along the lines of NetStat Systems [netstatsys.com]?
  • If you have access to a UNIX-based webserver, you can set up your own web-based monitoring service very quickly, with a software package called Netsaint (http://netsaint.org [netsaint.org]).

    We use it at work to keep track of how often our hosted website and our NT servers are down. It is fairly easy to install, and configuration isn't too bad since there are lots of examples you can copy-n-paste. It is very stable, and the generated data is laid out in a fairly readable manner (definately understandable by non-techies.) You can even do email and pager alerts when a host or particular service goes down!

  • Slight correction MAE = Metropolitan Area Exchange, WorldCom runs the two big ones MAE-East and West plus a couple of smaller ones. Historically the old MAEs were based on FDDI-switches, which has long ago become bottleneck. The newer platform is based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer mode) which allows for higher speeds and better control over bandwidth used for peering between ISPs.

    For more info see http://www.mae.net

    Heiko
  • This looks like a VERY blatant attempt to get people to click onto Processtree. Has nothing to do with the article! Moderators?

  • SMTP? (Score:1)

    by Splat ( 9175 )
    Ok I'm going to look dumb here but.. Yahoo _has_ SMTP Servers? I've only ever used the POP3 servers, and my own ISP to send mail. I can't imagine Yahoo's SMTP servers being very reliable to begin with [the pop3 barely works as advertised], but what's the address? smtp.yahoo.com?
  • true, but for what he's looking for (seeing if servers are downed or overloaded...mainly http and smtp) the three above should suffice for finding out where bottlenecks are and suchlike, as well as normal browser messages (microsoft REALLY needs to do away with the default half-assed error messages in IE)...

    if you just want to know why your yahoo mail account isn't responding, there's generally no need to whip out the UNIX Swiss Army Chainsaw (tm)

    if what you're looking for is more comprehensive monitoring (specific services, machines, states, etc.) and most likely reporting/notification (email, paging, etc.) you're better off with some of the established systems...nocol comes immediately to mind (as does ipmon by mediahouse for you NT types).


    -dk
  • three words:

    nslookup
    ping
    traceroute

    now go monitor and such


    -dk
  • Hey, isn't that what the first for-pay Processtree [processtree.com] project is going to do?
    Look at their news [processtree.com] page for information.

    According to that page, 'the job is a quality-of-service monitoring system that provides real-time updates on the performance and availability of websites.'

    Wonder what they'll do with the data, though

  • "... while [35]slashdot.org [slashdot.org] has seen a pronounced improvement in stability over the last year."

    Draw your own conclusions.

  • I used to work at a small hosting company, and one of our customers used NetWhistle to try and keep track of his stuff. NetWhistle sent 400 emails a DAY to him saying it was down. We were 28 hops from netwhistle and no one else was very much closer in the northeast at the time (harvard.net, exodus...). Then he couldn't get OFF of NetWhistle. Toward the end, he was just filtering and forwarding all the mails to his account manager at our company to spread the love. He hit my pager account for about 30 minutes before it got un-funny.
  • another useful site that I use all the time is internet traffic report (http://www.internettrafficreport.com/) [internettr...report.com]

    this is especially useful in Australia as seen recently, most of the country is knocked out by one cable going down. *sigh*
    \\||//
    --ooo00ooo--
  • Use a site like http://www.anonymizer.com/ to surf to the website you want to check.

    Another method to use if it is your dns server that has gone crazy is to use http://www.network-tools.com as mentioned in another post.

  • While we're mentioning monitoring software, I'll put in a blatant plug for NetSaint(www.netsaint.org [netsaint.org]) - a GPL'ed monitoring package for Linux and most all other *NIX OSes that I started about 2 years ago.

    Anyway, detecting a "real" failure of network services (like POP, SMTP, etc) at a remote location (i.e. a popular website) is more difficult to do than most people may think. Since the remote host is serveral hops away from you, there are a number of potential breaking points in the network connection between you and the host.

    Most monitoring software will tell you if the service is unavailable from your point of view, but this may not be accurate for the rest of the world. If you want to know whether or not a particular service like SMTP was really down on a remote host (and not just down/unreachable from your point of view), you'd need to have several locations from which you are doing the monitoring. Since you don't own/aren't in charge of the host in question, you probably won't be able to get a really accurate view of what's going on, unless you can place enough monitoring hosts around the 'net or peer with other people who are doing monitoring...

  • If something like this is going to work, it will need to be distributed. Additionally, it will need to make use of traceroute somehow to see where the failure is occuring, to rule out that it's just a local problem.

    I guess this would also include building traceroute maps for the monitored servers, so that you actually know beforehand what links are between the monitoring server and the monitored host. Of course, these will need to be updated regularly, as they can change.

    Just a couple random thoughts that I have on this subject. It would be interesting to develop something like this.

    -- hiro aka wintahmoot
  • Yup, tcp,ip fingerprinting for OS detection, and banner for which server. You can verify this by messing around with tcpdump/netcat and getting them to determine the OS/server on your ip.

    However, I don't think they use polling for uptime. A reboot would only last 60 secs, and they poll very infrequently (sub-daily). All reboots would thus remain undetected. A second piece of evidence for this is the fact that they've been monitoring my host (www.var.cx aka ion.var.cx) for only 5 days, yet know it's uptime is 36 days.

    Hmm, I just noticed they failed to detect the OS (linux). Guess my isp's up to some funny stuff again...
  • On a slightly related note, does anybody know how netcraft determines uptime? I'd think it was tcp sequence numbers or something, since I can't find anything interesting in my http headers... Or are they sending some http request I haven't thought of.... Anybody?
  • Nope, I don't run systat... I'm not _that_ stupid... :-)
  • In case anybody still cares: I suspect they do it via tcp timestamps, see rfc1323, section 3.2
  • smtp send mail between sites, kinda like a mail truck drivieing [sic] from ottawa to toronto.

    I've heard that sometimes it's even a bit faster than that!
  • Well, we are talking about Yahoo here, so YMMV...

    All too true -- but at least it increases shareholder value! If it makes them more money to deliver free mail slowly or not at all, who are we to argue :)
  • What these people need is a customer service "line". Some place where they an email or even chat to live representatives. That and a status page of what is going on with their networks.

    It might not be great for marketing that something is actually down... but its better than keeping your lip buttoned.

    ---

  • According [whatsdown.net] to www.whatsdown.net [whatsdown.net], Yahoo.com was down for 10 hours (22. November)! Looks baaad!

    Wonder if it was true...

  • However, not all big sites will answer to ping.
    For example, I can't get a reply from cnn.com.
  • I've seen this done to compare the speed of online stockbrokers (Schwab, E-trade, Ameritrade, etc. - more than 20 in all). Don't have a URL handy, though...
  • I know there is a website that monitors the uptime, etc of the major ISP in the UK but off the top of my head I can't think where it is.

    Also I noticed that http://www.netcraft.com/ were doing some sort of monitoring of sites when you search to see what a site is running.

    Graham
  • Up until /. moved to Andover's cage at Exodus and upgraded the infrasturcture, the performance here was horrible.

    Dave
  • pobox.com offers SMTP access for $5 one-time setup fee. It's not obvious from their services but they will set it up if you ask them.
  • I haven't seen this mentioned yet. I use this to check sites I have hosted all over the US. The eventual distributed nature of this should make this an unbiased service, free of corporate spin about a farmer in Iowa cutting a line.

    I don't know if they monitor anything besides http. That's all I use it for.

    http://webperf.org/
  • This may sound mean, but I think that this is a seriously dumb idea. Who really cares if CNN.com is up or not? Go to ABC.com or MSNBC.com or some other major news website. Does this really matter?
  • I run a set of ezines. About half of the time while sending, the outbound mail bogs down. When it happens, 75% of the outbound connections are to yahoo.com. The log files are filled with messages that indicate the remote host accepted the connection and then stoped responding. This is worse than a failed connection because the sending box sits and waits until the connection times out. This has never happens for any other domain.

    I use qmail and follow the qmail mailing list. Others on the list have confirmed that yahoo is the problem.
  • www.sympaticousers.org uses something independent of the provider to give availability of services
    see it here [sympaticousers.org]
  • smtp send mail between sites, kinda like a mail truck drivieing from ottawa to toronto. POP3 and imap, are you going to your mailbox to get your mail, you personally only ever have to deal with smnp if you run a mail server or something like that
  • The only way to really guarantee that you'll have a permanent email address is to do it yourself. There are plenty of ways to do this. I used Granite Canyon [granitecanton.com] to do my DNS for a while. It is completely free.
    You can also find people who will forward email for entire domains for cheap or free. If you register your domain with Your Name Free [yournamefree.com] you can get free forwarding.
    Or, you can do what I do now: Run your own sendmail box. I handle all of my domain's email. I never have to worry about it breaking, because I know that I can fix it. I also have no one else to blame beside myself.
  • I think that they simply poll the web server on a constant interval. If the server doesn't respond, then it's down.

    No, they use something different. I'm not sure what it is, since the explanation [netcraft.com] is laking the details. For instance, they're reporting the uptime for my server (>90 days) accurately, even though I entered it only a month ago.

  • This looks like a VERY blatant attempt to get people to click onto Processtree. Has nothing to do with the article! Moderators?

    Maybe it's the beer, but it looks to me like Idaho's post has everything to do with the article, especially since other posters have said that a monitor like this would need to be distributed to many points, just like ProcessTree apparently wants to do.

    Yes, he's linking there with his Sponsor ID, but why is that so bad? And how in the world is it offtopic?

    The Slashdot question is about Tracking the Status of Popular Websites and the ProcessTree project is about (as noted by Idaho) "a quality-of-service monitoring system that provides real-time updates on the performance and availability of websites."

    The post has nothing to do with the article???

  • Ehm.. Have you read your own message??? I doesn't make any sense at all..

    It's even wrong. I always send my mail with smtp, which is the standard protocol for sending mail..

  • Well, whatsdown.net is down for me as I can't get to its nameservers. :-)
    Anyway, another useful service, when we are at it it www.traceroute.org [traceroute.org].

  • Well, we are talking about Yahoo here, so YMMV...


    --
    Turn on, log in, burn out...
  • I would think doing something like this would be fairly simple technically, but what about the legal aspects of it. what if the site reports, say, CNN as being down and they sue? (i can think of a number of arguments for a legal action). i don't think we'll see a solution anytime soon unless someone has the negotiating power to actually have a contract with all reportes websites.

    I think this could be done quite "safely"; perhaps a Slash-type site, where people could post "stories" along the lines of "I'm getting `connection refused' from www.cnn.com - anyone know what's up?". People could then indicate whether or not they are having similar problems, and any official reports ("Power outage at the hosting company - should be back up RSN" or whatever) could be added.

    There is one obvious reason they don't put status pages on their WWW sites - if there's a problem with the WWW site, how on earth are you going to read the status page to find out?!

    It's a good idea, I think, and as long as you stick to simply relaying reports, you should be OK legally? (IANAL, though...)

  • It would be nice if mail servers had a feature where if you decided that you were going to discontinue use of an address on it you could set it to do an autoreply with the correct address.

    I don't just mean for humans to read. If also, all clients supported this and could change address books ( and spam lists :-( ) accordingly then you could pretty much change addresses at will.

    Perhaps have that in conjunction with a system where everyone had 2 distinct addresses. If one doesn't work the original SMTP server will try the other before relaying an error to the client/sender.
    Start writing those RFC's!
  • Ok, lemme make sure i read this right. The SMTP servers were down, so you sent them an e-mail to tell them this? Duh.
  • =====
    Their POP3 servers also appear to be affected adversely by Outlook.
    =====

    I have experienced a problem sending email through outlook express. I had a file that, when attached to a message in outlook, would freeze up halfway through sending. It would do this consistently.
    The "bad" part was that each time I tried to send the message, another two sendmail processes were created on the mail server. I assume that outlook was not properly closing the sockets when I aborted the send because it took many hours before the sendmail processes quit even though my attempts to send the message were long past. I was able to consistently reproduce this across multiple sendmail installations, I could've filled the process table relatively easily. It was bizarre. The file was an mp3 file (I could send any other mp3 or regular file), I ended up zipping it.

    Maru

  • Which would basicly only tell you if the box was physicaly up, not if it was reponding to requests, which is more often the case with over loaded sits© Once web servers hit their configured maximum query limit they stop servicing further requests - that's what you should check for; as well as the actual physical up/down status - maybe you should add perl to your list©


    --

  • I think that they simply poll the web server on a constant interval. If the server doesn't respond, then it's down. I would assume that if I could cycle my server in between their polls I could maintain my uptime record. But this is just a guess. Another guess is that they use TCP fingerprinting for the OS detection. I am fairly certain, however, that they use the web server's banner for the server type and modules (PHP, SSL, etc.).


    -------
  • Yes, that's good, but what you really want is DIGEX Internet's NAP Looking Glass services. Go to nitrous.digex.net [digex.net] and select a NAP (MAE East is always a good one). You can do lotsa stuff from tehse systems. FYI: If you dont know, a NAP (or a MAE as MCI calles them) is a really freaking huge ethernet switch. MAE East, for example, connects most of Europe, and the eastern seaboard of the USA.


    -------

  • I've noticed much the same thing before. I admin approximately 60 mailing lists at work, with a few thousand yahoo.com subscribers in total. Most of the problems we have relating to mail delivery occur when our mail server gets stuck sending to Yahoo!'s SMTP servers, with the symptoms you describe - they accept connections fine but then hang when it comes to responding to commands.

    This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Yahoo!'s SMTP service seems to have failed in some way or another at least once a week for the past couple of months now, with outages sometimes lasting 48 hours or longer. Yahoo! haven't responded to any of the mails I've sent them, or posted anything at all about these problems on their site.

  • Sir,

    That was rude, obnoxious, arrogant and just dripping with sarcasm. Please keep it up.

    .
  • I always try Anonymizer [anonymizer.com] or SilentBrowser [silentbrowser.com]. They're free (and anonymous) surfing proxies. Often, one of these can get a route.
  • Whatsdown.net uses pings to see how well you can reach a whole bunch of sites, but it doesn't mention which route the packets take. They should at least mention which network they're hooked up to.

    Anyway, to assess the icing conditions on the Internet, you should also look at the routing. One good starting point for locating so-called looking glasses is Nanog [nanog.org].

  • Don't forget that a lot of ISP's are now blocking port 25 out of thier routers, to prevent spam. So, even if you can use yahoo's outgoing mail servers, there is nothing saything that you can even *talk* to them. Try telneting to port 25 of their SMTP mail server and see if you can even get the socket to open. good luck
  • And we could do this a couple nifty ways.

    One would be to start distributed sniffers on every network around the globe, that merely sent logs back to some centralized location for tracking. We could write a dozen different worms that manage to invade various OSs, and patch init so it sends data out over the network--even through firewalls!

    The other easy way is to put a patch into everybody's browser that sends stats back somewhere--but then we'd need to make them upgrade to it.
    I got it! Why don't we just all go IPv6 and tell the world that there isn't a browser in existence that supports it! Then they'll have to upgrade!

    Oh wait, didn't M$ put tracking hooks into IE on ME?!?!!
    Seems to me I already saw that..... heh

  • not all, I heard just Earthlink in the US, noone in Europe, I don't know of the rest of the world, thou..

    Aarno
  • I've had the same problems with a Myrealbox.com [myrealbox.com] and a MsgTo.com [msgto.com] account. There SMTP server was sometimes down, this is of course not such a tradgedy, the bad thing was that there POP, IMAP servers were down and I noticed that I effectively lost mail.

    I mailed them a couple of times about this but I never got a reply. I now use an e-mail alias which seems to be much more reliable.

    Disclaimer: both services were (are?) still in beta when I used them, though that status must have been for over a year.

  • Thanks, fixed that now.
  • The free version of this is at www.poboxes.com with lots of domains to choose from
  • We even have several. DMCA, RIAA, MPAA... The plague of 4 letter acronym bad things has not lessened. And lo, it HAS united us. We all complain in unison now...
  • their entire database. It crashed about a week ago. I use the web interface for yahoo mail, and last week, when I tried to check my email, it said, in big bold red letters, "Database temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." Basically, the whole thing was screwed for about a day. The next day it worked fine, at least for me.

  • Sites like Crosswinds.net [crosswinds.net] have their own updates page [crosswinds.net] where they give up-to-date information on what's right and wrong about their service. I haven't seen any other websites/services which give such up-to-date information.

    On a related note, I'd like to add that managing your own mail is the cleanest solution, rather than depending on different ISPs' POP3 and SMTP servers. This of course requires a permanent connection in most cases, but is the best. This way you manage your own e-mail, and move it around, when you move. You obviously need to know how to setup and manage such a server yourself at home/office, but it pays you back.

  • I've been using Mr. Greenspun's trusty uptime robot for over a year. Sends and e-mail out whenver one of my critical servers doesn't respond.
  • You can freely use http://www.netwhistle.com server checking and emailing hourly service...
  • One alternate method to using a forwarding service is to run your very own server, on your very own freshly purchased domain. This method allows you to control every aspect of the hardware and software on the machine, so that you can use Linux instead of Windows NT, and decent MTAs like Postfix.

    Since the server is under your control, you can be reasonably assured that the machine won't magically disappear for some unknown reason, and as long as you maintain the machine and pay the domain fees, you will have a permanent mailbox. You can also play with nifty things like using dynamic DNS, running a webserver, writing your own POP3 daemon that uses PostgreSQL, and so forth.

    One nice thing about doing this is that you can setup relaying to allow you to relay messages through your freshly installed mailserver, and get around blocks placed on your ISP. (Some people block some parts of the big broadband ISPs, like rr.com and mediaone.net)

    (As to how to get a machine attached to the network, some ISPs *do* offer free co-location space to people who work there. :)

  • it could be down because of the ISP connection you have or because of CNN or Yahoo's site being down. It seems that to monitor accurately a site being "down", you need to monitor if the server has been brought down, which is hard to do without having access to the server, or if the internet connection to the site has been brought down, which could be done by having multiple sites pinging the servers at random intervals. But that said, internet connections are too flaky to say if my internet connection or yahoo's internet connection has been brought down. So in all, i think it'll be a rather useless stastitics to keep track of.
  • Secure Anti-Censorship Proxy
    https://lm.lcs.mit.edu/px.html

    If you cannot connect to a site and you think your local ISP is responible use the above link.
  • well i found this site which gives a basic overview, mayber it'll help you out. http://www.internettrafficreport.com/
  • Processtree was the first thought in my head when I saw this article...

    (Although he didn't have to post the link with his sponsor number in it... Exactly why I strip those numbers out when I go to look at sites like that... greedy bastards...)
  • The Yahoo servers for SMTP services that USER CONNECT TO have been quite flaky. I have outages that lasted up to a month. POP3 is also bad from time to time.

    You can still send via a web interface, but that is pain when you want to keep copies.

    And yes to ask question about the mail services you have to send mail. I have that conversion with them before. you want to talk CATCH22?

    Note Yahoo commonly gets swamped the SMTP from outside world into Yahoo system to an actual account can take upto 8 hours. So enjoy the FREE mail.

    jackb
  • Starting about six weeks ago, I could no longer send mail from any of my Yahoo accounts using Outlook Express 5 (admit it, if you have to use Windows, OE5 is a good client) and my home dial-up Earthlink account. I could send, however, using an identical setup at work, where we have a dedicated frame connection. Other freinds of mine have reported similar problems. It seems that Yahoo SMTP servers will not accept connections from certain blocks of IP addresses (anyone got a line on why this might be?) After changing the outgoing mail server setting from SMTP.MAIL.YAHOO.COM to MAIL.EARTHLINK.NET, everything works fine. Worth a try for anyone struggling with Yahoo email.
  • GC has that, but it's well hidden. It's the System Status [yahoo.com] page. I didn't find it linked from anywhere except deep in the help (but maybe I'm dumb). I suspect there might be one on Yahoo also (since GC "belongs" to Yahoo), but I frankly don't know where that might be.
  • I believe he was suggesting one do a search for "Internet Weather Report" at Google, not that Google runs it.

  • Yahoo's SMTP Server's address is: smtp.mail.yahoo.com Take care.
  • hmm just checked out whatsdown.net, hasn't been updated in 3 days...ah well, so much forthat one...

  • I use the service of operamail [operamail.com]. They have been very reliable some times ago but now they have downtime at least once the week. (Hey this can not be possible. They run their servive on NT.)



    You get an answer to your ping but the webmailer and the pop3 access both do not work. Just using ping to detect server outages seems not to be sufficient.

  • I have led research development workgroups for Media Metrix (now merged with Jupiter Comm) for some time and the answer is: there is no current webposting of this nature that is reliable. It is something we have discussed posting before, a monitoring system for the major sites, but it has never come to fruition. I doubt at this point it would be reliable since sites like Yahoo! or Hotmail (the two most used and complained about) have so many regions within their networks, and the problems last for very brief periods, it is hard to imagine users would receive their caution info in time to be of service.

    But if I am mistaken and someone has an idea, I'd be happy to pass it along to whomever I could (giving full credit of course :)

    1. humor for the clinically insane [mikegallay.com]

  • I've got a cable modem, so it isn't a dialup....

    In any event, if I use @Home's SMTP server, I have two problems. One, regardless of how I set up my clients, half of the other clients out there will respond to my @Home address, which is *not* where I want to receive my mail. Using my own SMTP server, I can set the thing up so that it looks like it came from wherever, and I will then get replies where I want them (pobox.com) and people who add my address to their addressbook will add the right one (pobox.com, *not* home.com).

    The second problem is that with @Home's mail servers, I would have no confidence using their SMTP mail servers that my mail was actually getting out with any degree of reliability....

    In any event, I haven't had any problem using my own computer's SMTP. If push really came to shove, I might pay pobox the extra money to be able to use their SMTP servers.

    (The other SMTP available is the one for the ISP where I really receive my E-mail, and which hosts my website. This is sonic.net, a *great* ISP for anybody in the right parts of Northern California. I still use it as my emergency backup dilaup, though naturally I don't dial in to it much given the cable modem. However, I can't use their SMTP servers from my @Home account, because they have the anti-spam "we won't send mail not from sonic.net" policies in place.)

    -Rob

  • I agree with the consensus so far that such a site would be a good idea. However I do wonder about its functionality- if a server is down, then your email simply wont work. You tell it is down because it doesn't, there is little point going to a site which says "Yahoo's SMTP server is down. They are fixing it and hope for it to be working again shortly". I wouldn't actually use such a service- I'd simply revert to using another email account. If it were a major problem with their servers I'm sure they will find some way of letting people know more directly. To be perfectly honest when an email account does not appear to work I don't bother unduly about it- I use another one. If after a while it still doesn't work then I get a little worried, and check it's not me. If after a long while it isn't working then I go looking around seeing if it's them. If it is, you can be assured in a little while things will be up and running again as usual. Nevertheless a quick way of checking it's not your own fault is a useful idea, but in practice unless you've been fiddling unduly with your settings it is unlikely to be your fault. Also most people have more than one email address, and so if others work then it is a good indication that the problem with the one that doesn't isnt anything you have done.
  • Why dump on Yahoo for a one-day outage? Altavista.net ("powered" by) mail.com sucks a whole lot more than Yahoo. I know -- I use both.

    When you press them for an answer about their lousy service, altavista/mail.com will send a form email that basically says "live with it".

  • Ummmm... the Internet Traffic Report [internettr...report.com] isn't Google's; it is one of the original Andover.net sites. People forget that Andover was a fine, generally profitable little company before Slashdot and freshmeat and the IPO and the VA buy and all that.

    Another Andover site that's still around is one of the earliest online free code archives -- freecode.com [freecode.com].

    Nobody ever "heard of" Andover back in those days because each of the company's original sites was treated as a separate entity and we never pushed the "network" thing. But we were there, doing our little thing and having a nice, low-key time. :)

    - Robin

  • The monitoring service would not be a single point -- it would be a network. If nothing else, they could distribute it via Akamai or something similar.
  • If I ran one of the big sites, I'd do what everyone else does: blame someone else!

    Possible choices:
    - Your ISP
    - A backbone router went dead
    - Your local network admins have put up a firewall...
    - You mistyped the URL....
    - the site is slashdotted
    - etc..etc...

    I'm not so sure many of these sites would WANT to have their network outage publicly available. Might be somewhat embarassing for some...

    Cheers,
    Vic
  • siteseer and keynote. Although these are "pay" services. They offer ways of tracking to see the response time of servers as well as if they are up.

    You can also try pinging yahoo's mail servers.

    Personally I think you kind of get what you pay for. I used to use hotmail at one point as I was doing lots of traveling. They LOST some of my email while upgrading there servers. They said sorry. I stopped using them.

    Free email is not a lucritive busines. It makes its money through advertising. As you may have heard (or not) advertising on the web is not considered a lucritive business. Hey doubleclick took a hit this last quarter, and there stock was down. You're best bet is to talk to yahoo about a pay account. They have them and then no matter who you use as an ISP you can have access through an @ yahoo mailbox. The other option is to use another portol for free mail.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Well, Netcraft just started tracking web site downtime.
  • You can see the CNN uptime graph [netcraft.com] at Netcraft.
  • This is an interesting idea especially because the big sites tend to outsource their site's infrastructure to the big players, such as Globalcenter, Exodus, AboveNet, Digital Island, Verio, even Akamai.

    Tracking which site uses which provider and THEN tracking their availability and performance should give us some indication on how the big names in the hosting business serve their best known customers. This information should prove to be valuable even to those of us who don't really make the hosting companies' most-important-customers list.
  • I think this would be great, althoug I'd worry about the implementation details. How would you test servers to see if they were up or not? How would you find out what was wrong, exactly, with one of them? If anyone ever makes a web site like this, it would be difficult.

    However, if it was done right, ISPs could install a package that sort of "mirrored" the test results, so that their customers could see how things looked at the ISP's offices.



    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • Here's a BETTER idea for how to spend your $15:

    Just buy yourself a DOMAIN for only $15 / year at DirectNIC [directnic.com] or a number of other BARGAIN domain registrars. DirectNIC offers your domain UNLIMITED numbers of both web addresses and email addresses...

    How can this be???? Because each email address/URL merely redirects the mail/URL to your chosen account/site...

    SO, you can get your own DOMAIN, HOSTING, REDIRECTION, URL PARKING, and PERMANENT UNLIMITED EMAIL ADDRESSES for the $15 / year bargain.
  • I would think doing something like this would be fairly simple technically, but what about the legal aspects of it. what if the site reports, say, CNN as being down and they sue? (i can think of a number of arguments for a legal action). i don't think we'll see a solution anytime soon unless someone has the negotiating power to actually have a contract with all reportes websites.
  • Netcraft can't get uptime from Windows servers, because there isn't an easy way to get /proc info by sitting at the machine, much less over the network. I can view the slsahdot statistics from slashdot.org slashboxes. (I think there's a good ad for Linux: "We're so good, we brag about our uptime!")

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • "Last week, I was having huge problems with my free account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down."

    "I sent them an e-mail asking about this..."
  • Fear of the law is overblown. It is perfectly legitimate to report that "my site/service was unable to connect to CNN / Yahoo-SMTP / Whatever, or to state that my site/service took x milliseconds to get to this site, y to get the that site."
  • Sounds like you're looking for a Internet Weather/Traffic Report: Google internet weather report [google.com] Google internet traffic report [google.com]
  • Where can I begin... First, using your ISPs mail server does not mean 'another hop' in the term of your speed... In fact, it takes more bandwidth to send it via your MTA than to send it to your ISP...

    Next, where do you get this additional hardware cost stuff? From using your ISPs mail server? its going to cost you to pay for more hardware? Wether you use it or not, they will have a mail server, and you WILL have to pay for it, regardless.

    Furthermore, why do you not like the dial up list? Do you know how much spam that stops? Throwaway dial up accounts account for most of the spam sent these days.

    Next, Users arent clueless by using their ISPs mail server, and they can run an OS that can handle mail traffic wonderfully, but WHY? they dont NEED to, and, they have the potential of getting their mail rejected because they're on a dialup (including broadband IPs)

    Finally, if your ISPs mail servers accept the mail, and say it will be delivered, and it takes 'hours' for it to get there, its more than likely not their fault. Now if you said that you cant connect to your ISPs MTA, then you can blame them...

    These are the views of me, a competant mail administrator of a redundant mid-sized network. I speak only the truth of my views, and is not meant to put anyone down, but offer a differant perspective.
  • It shouldn't be difficult setting such a site. But as it gets more popular, I wonder if we'll need another page reporting the status of this page

  • There is at least one remote ping service (Score:3)

    by electricmonk ( 169355 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @08:59AM (#602332) Homepage
    network-tools.com is a site that lets you ping, traceroute, resolve, or otherwise mess with an IP or DNS address. You can always try pinging Yahoo!s SMTP servers or cnn.com from there, at least. Not the most elegant solution, but it works.

  • Re:Mail servers down? (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @06:38PM (#602333) Homepage

    The Yahoo servers for SMTP services that USER CONNECT TO have been quite flaky. I have outages that lasted up to a month. POP3 is also bad from time to time.

    Their POP3 servers also appear to be affected adversely by Outlook. I have a friend who insists on using Outlook, and she e-mailed me. Yahoo's POP servers choked on it; I had to log in through their web access to delete the message. It's repeatable, though I don't know what part of the message kills it.

    To top it off, she's one of these community college computer science students. She won't listen to me when I tell her that Outlook isn't standards-compliant. (And, I had to do three hours of tech support to help her install a second hard drive in her Windows 98 machine, to demonstrate what her third year at St. Lawrence College has taught her. She still doesn't have it working, mostly because she doesn't believe you can only run two IDE devices on each IDE bus.) <sigh>

    Note Yahoo commonly gets swamped the SMTP from outside world into Yahoo system to an actual account can take upto 8 hours. So enjoy the FREE mail.

    Yeah, I use one of these accounts. I just set up Sendmail on my gateway machine.

  • In response to Yahoo (Score:3)

    by DaSyonic ( 238637 ) <DaSyonicNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday November 25, 2000 @09:02AM (#602334) Homepage
    I was testing some filters on my mailserver the other day, and I happened to do a test of sending an email to a Yahoo! account. After realizing the mail got stuck in the queue, I inspected Yahoo's mail servers. Unbelievable, They have 6 MX addresses, each one having 13 IP addresses (round robin). Well, I became curious after realizing the machines were up, so I whipped up a script to telnet to the SMTP port of each mail server. Only 2 were accepting SMTP commands! This was (if i remember right) of 75 mail servers. If Yahoo! were to have their network status put up, they would be utterly embarrased. All the machines were available, but either SMTP was closed down, would drop you immediatly after connection, or just not accept any commands at all. The problem now seems to be resolved, but I doubt Yahoo! would admit to such a failure, it would make them look very bad.

    Probably the best way to determine an outtage is to do some inspecting yourself, run pings, traceroutes, telnet to the service, test, and probe to find out what could be going on.

  • Re:Permanent E-mail Address (Score:3)

    by DaSyonic ( 238637 ) <DaSyonicNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday November 25, 2000 @09:09AM (#602335) Homepage
    One problem with using a local sendmail to send your email could be if the recipitents mail server uses the MAPS Dialup Blacklist... Basically, what that is is a database of dial up users, and when your mail server sends mail, and it checks your IP address, if it is identified as a dialup, it will not allow your mailserver to communicate. This is why you should use your ISPs mail server. When you use your ISPs mailserver, it will not be on the dialup list, and will be allowed to communicate (unless its on RBL, relay list, etc)
    Ironically, as I write this, the mail-abuse.org DNS servers are unavailable. Interesting...
    When it comes back up though, goto http://mail-abuse.org [mail-abuse.org] for more information

  • Permanent E-mail Address (Score:3)

    by rknop ( 240417 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @08:58AM (#602336) Homepage

    Yes, I know this is a tangental point to the article, but...

    For a permanent E-mail address, consider a forwarding service, e.g. pobox.com. That's what I use. It's not free, but it's only something like $15/year. The advantage of this is that you can keep the same E-mail address always (or at least for as long as pobox.com survives), even as you move between accounts. If your free hotmail or yahoo account starts to go south, get one somewhere else... and just point your pobox.com forwarding address at the new one.

    pobox.com seems to be pretty reliable; I don't think I've lost any E-mail. With few exceptions, every POP/SMTP/mail server I've used has had trouble at one time or another. (We're not even going to talk about @home.) Forwarding services are a little easier to get right. Since I have the freedom to point my "same" E-mail address at any mail server I want, I can achieve greater stability without always having to tell people to change my E-mail addres....

    (I also use my own computer's sendmail to *send* mail, instead of an external SMTP server. Hey, why not? It's not like I have sendmail running, I just give it a one-time invocation. I've set it up so that the From address is my pobox.com address.)

    -Rob

  • Some useful sites for that... (Score:5)

    by xee ( 128376 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @09:00AM (#602337) Journal
    Netcraft: www.netcraft.com
    Netcraft will tell you the uptime history of any site that it watches (currently over 22 million)

    Keynote: internetpulse.keynote.com
    Keynote has some really cool cross-backbone nodes that tell you the performance from one backbone to another.

    Whatsdown.net: www.whatsdown.net
    Whatsdown watches various sites and backbones and tells you the current performance of them. This is probably what you want, because it watches specific popular sites.

    Check out Google's directory (DMOZ) for some more sites like these. I hope this helped.


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